Trump’s Crypto Profiteering Is Worse Than You Think w/ Jacob Silverman

0:00 This is a situation where you could be a CEO of a billion-dollar startup that everyone wants to be a part of, and someone who works for your investor can call you a Nazi and a terrorist online, and like nothing happens.

0:31 Made in partnership with The Nation magazine. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Jacob Silverman. Jacob is a journalist and the author of the forthcoming book Gilded Rage, Elon Musk, and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley. He'll certainly be back on the show in the next couple of months to talk about it.

0:46 But in the meantime, I wanted to have him back because he's been doing a lot of reporting on the tech industry's adoption of this really right-wing politics, its links to Donald Trump, and how Donald Trump is enriching himself from this relationship, not just with the tech industry more broadly, but from the crypto industry in particular, as he is increasingly engaging in these scammy cryptocurrency schemes that are making him millions of dollars in the process.

1:10 So we start by talking about this guy, Sean McGuire, who is a partner at Sequoia, one of the leading venture capital firms in Silicon Valley, who you might remember recently sent some tweets about Zoran Mamdani, the Democratic candidate for the mayor of New York City, calling him an Islamist, and ultimately not really backing down on his racist characterizations of Mamdani.

1:31 And I wanted to discuss that with Jacob for a few reasons. One, to understand who this guy actually is and to see his evolution, but also because I feel like it acts as this illustration of this broader dynamic in Silicon Valley where not only is it acceptable to express these kinds of opinions, but it seems almost encouraged and rewarded.

1:51 And that also leads us to have a conversation about the ways that it can be completely acceptable for someone like Maguire to say racist and Islamophobic things about someone like Mandani, but at the same time, speaking out against the genocide in Palestine is something that's very difficult for many in Silicon Valley to do because they know that they would face consequences if they were to do so.

2:13 So I wanted to explore that dynamic with him before we talk a bit more about Donald Trump directly, right? Not just the relationship between him and the tech industry and what that looks like now that Trump and Musk have had their falling out, but more broadly, how the Trump administration is legitimizing the crypto industry, giving them the legislation that they have long hoped for, and how that's directly leading to money getting into Trump's bank account from a bunch of crypto people who want to make sure that they are not going to be held to account, prosecuted, investigated in the way that they were under the Biden administration.

2:49 So I think that this is a really good kind of update episode on what has been going on with this extreme right-wing movement in Silicon Valley, how it relates to Donald Trump. So I hope that you enjoy it because I think Jacob is the perfect person to have this discussion with. If you do like this conversation, make sure to leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice.

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3:40 Thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation. Jacob, welcome back to the show. Glad to be here. I'm always excited to chat with you. You know, you're always looking into such fascinating topics. Can't wait for your book, which is out very soon, which people should go pre-order. I'll remind them again.

3:55 But you've been writing some really interesting articles lately about this relationship between the tech industry and the Trump administration, about this broader embrace of right-wing politics that we're seeing in the industry and championing of it really. And so I wanted to start with one particular example of this that really seemed to get a lot of attention given what it was and what happened around it.

4:16 And that was that in early July, Sequoia partner Sean Maguire, he got a lot of attention for some racist tweets that he sent about Zoran Mamdani, the Democratic candidate for the mayor of New York City. So to start, who is Sean Maguire? And what was he saying about Mamdani that really uh got people angry?

4:35 So Sean Maguire is a general partner at Sequoia, which is really the leading venture capital firm in the valley. I mean, there's a lot of mythology attached to it because of the companies it supported. It has $85 billion or so under management. It's a huge influential firm. But it's also been a sort of publicly apolitical one, or tried to be in its uh existence, despite having some of its partners be kind of politically active as Democrats and Republicans on their own.

5:04 But Sean McGuire is 39, he's a general partner there. He he's known for doing a lot of Elon Musk deals, for kind of being Sequoia's point man to invest in XAI, SpaceX, Twitter going private, even the boring company. And he he's done some other work too. And as I write in this article for Business Insider, he actually has a pretty extensive and interesting at times history, I think.

5:27 Over the last couple years, really, since October 7th, he's been very publicly right-wing, at times, according to a lot of people, bigoted, Islamophobic in his expressions, you know, very much in support of Israel and Israeli war aims, and kind of seeing himself, I think, as I write in the article, as kind of this like information warrior in this larger counter-terrorism struggle and the struggle that he's very explicit about, which is between the West and radical Islam.

5:57 If you're around during the war on terror or even sort of the Obama-era version of it, like it's it's a lot of that kind of stuff, except VCs are now part of the conflict and they're uh you know funding companies that are involved in the conflict. Like I'm going a little astray here, but one of the points that I make is that McGuire invests on behalf of Sequoia in Israeli tech companies, especially in ones that are currently involved in the genocide in Gaza.

6:23 So there's a lot of political issues going on here.

6:25 And he was like previously in Afghanistan back during the George W. Bush years and things like that, right?

6:30 Yeah. He was getting a PhD at Caltech in physics, I think quantum physics, and then he says that he was recruited by the director of DARPA, the you know, sort of skunk works part of the Pentagon, which is very highly mythologized. And the woman who recruited him is a Caltech alumnus, and he was sort of patriotic, but uh a self-proclaimed kind of Democrat centrist.

6:56 This was about 2012. I mean, people around him who I talked to said this guy wasn't very political. I I feel like we should just say real quick what he did in early July. Did we already say that?

7:06 Or yeah, sure thing. Yeah. So so what what was he actually tweeting? What got people angry?

7:10 He said that Zoran Mandami was a secret Islamist and basically went on this tirade about him and eventually a lot about Bam Dani's father, Mahmoud Mamdani, who is uh perhaps a radical lefty, but a relatively obscure academic at Colombia. But Colombia, of course, is also the den of all evil right now.

7:28 It broke this damn in social media and in tech, where you had a lot of people, especially a lot of Muslims in tech and executives and founders, were like, enough already. This guy for the last couple of years has been saying a lot of crazy stuff like this. And how can Sequoia stand for this? But to go back to your earlier question, yeah, part of how he we did get here is that I think a formative period in Maguire's life was when he was at Caltech and then got recruited to go work for DARPA as a civilian in Afghanistan and spend over a year there.

7:58 There's a program you can read about online that's been reported was reported about more than 10 years ago in some publications called Project Memex or Nexus 7 is another program. A lot of it ended up being open sourced or like they spun out companies. A big part of it was kind of developing search tools for beyond the surface web.

8:17 So for the deep web or for like devices that are connected to the internet, sort of like Shodan, if you've heard of that Internet of Things search engine, but beefed up and for cybersecurity and national security uses. That aspect of it actually was what uh McGuire and his group were working on. I don't really know actually where they're based in Afghanistan.

8:36 He may have tweeted at some point, but I do know that they traveled around. He was kind of known for his sense of adventurism. They lived in Afghan cities at times, like outside the wire, so to speak. He had traveled to dozens of countries on his own and was kind of like an outgoing backpacker type, besides being very technically and scientifically capable, according to people around him.

8:58 And it sounded like Afghanistan at first was supposed to be kind of an extension of that adventure almost. Like, yes, I mean, he was interested in national security, and but mostly the uh this idea of cybersecurity protecting U.S. networks from being hacked by Russia, China, North Korea, Iran. No one seems to mention Israel, but probably Israel too, and went there again with this sense of kind of duty and adventure, perhaps in mind.

9:25 But I think Afghanistan was perhaps one stop on his kind of milestone towards radicalization. He seemed to be, or he at least claims to have been very involved in kind of counterterrorism missions there or access to very privileged intelligence. Some of it does seem a little bit of kind of war hero braggadocio or something, but other people have kind of testified at least to his technical abilities and that he was there and and maybe saw some things.

9:53 Do we know how he kind of gets from that point where, okay, he's in Afghanistan, you know, he seems to be like kind of a backpackery figure. He presents himself as like maybe more of a Democratic Party supporter to now, like, you know, he's explicitly spouting racist, Islamophobic stuff, acting as though he's this kind of like warrior in the civilizational battle that these people seem to be trying to present themselves as being in.

10:16 Yeah, and that's the terms he speaks in, especially, you know, that are familiar to people who are tracking like the tech right and the this elite tech right. So what happens is he he comes back from Afghanistan, he resumes his studies at Caltech, but he also helps spin out a company from DARPA from their project in Afghanistan called Cadium with a Q.

10:36 It was with some of his colleagues from there, some of them are scientists. The CEO is a CIA analyst who leaves the agency to uh go be CEO of this company, and they do pretty well. It's basically this technology. I mean, I I haven't tried it or really heard anyone from anyone who used it, but they had a mix of government and big corporate clients, and they scanned people's networks, and it was basically like, do you have unauthorized machine computers or devices connected to your network?

11:03 You know, are they located in Moscow? Are there people snooping on your networks? And it it was a successful company for a while, and then it got renamed Expanse and it was sold to Palo Alto Networks, which is a huge cybersecurity firm. And the number I've seen, there are different numbers tossed around, but I I think it was about one billion.

11:20 And so after this, um, you had part of that progression down towards like the counter-terrorism info warrior path, but then he finishes his PhD. This is a very high-energy guy, while also working at Google Ventures, uh, where he gets a job as a venture capitalist and later becomes G V. And one of the main radicalizing events, I think, is that he left G V in part because he claims that he didn't get promoted to full partner, I believe, because he's a white man.

11:50 And at the time, there was some kind of internal policy, it seems, to promote more women. I don't know what the exact policy was, because I don't think that may be publicly known, but also in his mind it's no white men whatsoever. And this is very much during early woke backlash. You know, I use woke mostly in the sense that these people use woke and not as like it's not always an accurate descriptor or whatever, but like this is a period in which a number of people in tech have the same kind of reactionary response to what they see as woke politics or woke overreach.

12:27 And so he left for Sequoia, which is the biggest VC firm, as I said. Uh, Patrick Collison supposedly helped him. He's the co-founder of Stripe. Maguire had invested in his company. Uh, one other thing that I think is worth noting is that when McGuire shared this story about where he claimed he had been discriminated against as a white man, this was last year.

12:49 You know, he's very active on X and he likes to sort of be goaded into don't make me do it, don't make me, oh, right, fine, I'll tell the story. You know, sometimes he puts up polls, should I tell the story about how I was denied promotion for being a white man? The event that happened that day that prompted him to sort of go to his audience, who then said, okay, do it, and he did it, was that Google Gemini had created pictures of America's founding fathers as black men.

13:16 And, you know, this is one of those two-day news, viral news things that pissed off people in tech a lot, of course, from Elon Musk on down, because wokeness had infiltrated the AI. And this is actually a matter of existential concern in Musk's eye. So that's why he was sharing it. I just think that's revealing.

13:35 Like that not only does he think, like, okay, I was oppressed for being a white man, but like, oh, I gotta share this because Google has gone too far. The generative AI that doesn't understand anything is creating uh George Washington as a black man, civilization is falling.

13:50 That's so funny that that is like the thing that really set him off, right? And all these guys.

13:55 Yeah, they take this stuff seriously. I mean, sometimes they're hysterical about it for just a day or two, but like they treat it all as a big deal. Anyway, the other major thing that I think radicalized him was October 7th. I don't think he was raised Jewish. At some point, it seems he converted. He married a Jewish woman from a kind of Iranian-Israeli family, a very wealthy one in LA.

14:16 I don't really get into her background that much. Uh, her father was involved in Qualcomm, but he added her last name, Cone, after he got married. At the same time, I talked to someone who went to his wedding in, which was in Israel in, I think, 2018, and like the guy knew him well and said to me, like, I had no idea he was Jewish until I went to his wedding in Israel.

14:37 But, you know, like a lot of folks after October 7th, their politics were catalyzed in one direction or another. He went very right, became much more talkative about his Judaism and his Zionism, and really became like this crusader for Israel. And beyond just like being a Twitter warrior, there have been times in the past when Sequoia had invested in Israeli companies.

14:59 A lot of VCs, frankly, just invest in like a couple Israeli firms every year. Sometimes it's just a fintech firm or something like that. Sometimes it might be connected to the military establishment. But what happened after October 7th was that Sequoia kind of made it, or at least people at Sequoia, led by seemingly by Sean Maguire, made it kind of a deliberate project to invest in Israel.

15:22 I believe they opened another office there. Sean Maguire bought a home in Israel. He started going regularly. He posts about this on LinkedIn, for example. And they're investing in a lot of Israeli companies, from cybersecurity to AI sensors that are already being used in Gaza, various military companies.

15:40 I mean, it sounds misleading to call it defense tech. There's an article on Sequoia's website that Maguire wrote with a couple colleagues where they're very explicit. They talk about techno warriors from Israel's elite units. I mean, people may have heard of Unit A200, which is kind of the elite surveillance technological unit, but there are others that, of course, feed directly into the Israeli high-tech industry.

16:02 And Sequoia, via Sean Maguire and a couple of his colleagues, are very interested in investing in this stuff and are putting millions of dollars into it and celebrating it. Like in this article you can read on Sequoia's website. And they even say, like, we developed this thesis independently of Sequoia, they say.

16:19 Like they work for Sequoia, but they're kind of speaking for the three of them and whatever capital they represent, that Israel is going to be this hub for these kinds of technologies that will be, I'm paraphrasing now, but will be be exported to NATO countries. So this is a kind of idea or a thesis, even that we've heard before, or like from lefty academics, like Israel and Gaza is the testing ground for Israeli military innovation that is then exported elsewhere.

16:49 You know, it's kind of like they're acknowledging that and saying, like, we like that. We're going to invest in that. And I think to add one more piece to this, like, this didn't make into my article, but you know, there's a self-consciousness about this kind of stuff, but they're proud of where they stand.

17:04 Like the right-wing VCs are proud of their views and their militarism. McGuire shared an article within the last month or so on uh on social media, and it was some, I think it was a video lecture about like the deep history of Silicon Valley at or the Cold War history of Silicon Valley. And you know, some people share this kind of thing to say, like, did you know that a lot of this stuff kind of comes from an unsavory place or from the defense establishment during the Cold War?

17:30 And for some people that's a, oh wow, that, you know, that's ethically complicates things. I have to think about this. But he was clearly sharing it from a point of pride and from a desire to return to that. And that's of course what we see across big swaths of VC in the tech industry, is like they they want to be part of the new military industrial establishment.

17:49 They want to build it, they are proud of it, and they see a lot of profit in it. And so, in in his own way, um, Maguire is part of the leading edge of this.

17:58 That is something that's important for us to understand, right? And of course, Anthony Lowenstein, who wrote the book The Palestine Laboratory, talking about the types of things who were talking about there, has been on the show, but you know, as you're saying, talking about this stuff from a very different perspective than what someone like Sean Maguire would think about the proliferation of these technologies and how they are developed in Israel and used on Palestinians, right?

18:20 So there are a couple things that I want to pick up on based on what you were saying, right? The first is so you have someone like Maguire who is making these statements, who, you know, I don't know, we could call it a Twitter troll, or you know, he's trying to be provocative on Twitter, but also really firmly believes these types of things.

18:37 When he has a moment where he calls someone like Zora Mamdani an Islamist and is kind of making these racist statements, is that like good for him from a perspective of like notoriety? You know, he's getting all these tech people to come and and defend him, even though there are, of course, detractors, people criticizing him, people even criticizing Sequoia because of the types of things that he's saying.

19:01 But is that really hurting him at the end of the day, given the composition of the tech industry in this moment?

19:07 Yeah, I think that's a good point. And the short answer is it's not hurting him. It might even be helping him. I mean, I talked to some VCs and someone who who works for one of Sequoia's limited partners, one of the their investors. These people can't speak under their own names because they would be fired.

19:24 I mean, part of the theme of my article is actually that basically if you're not a tech founder, you can't or a high-level VC, you can't speak out about this stuff without getting fired. And that that's a real problem. But the people I talk to, and some of them like McGuire, some of them don't, some of them like him, but think he's kind of gotten a little nutty, as someone told me.

19:44 You know, there are different sort of interpretations. Some of these people are Democrats, but still, like no one seems to really think that it's hurt him. Some people actually think it's helping his deal flow, as I quote one guy saying, uh, because he is articulating a thesis, as I said before, or these ideas that a lot of people agree with.

20:01 And bravado is actually sort of a valued quality in some VCs now, especially the guys doing military stuff or doing stuff that in some way might be in defiance of the establishment. I mean, the government certainly doesn't care anymore. The government's their partner in a lot of this stuff. But, you know, people who want to somehow seem anti-woke or politically incorrect or don't don't want to apologize for who they are, or perhaps are massages or racists in the ways that a fair number of young people in uh tech seem to be.

20:30 You know, there's still a lot of Democrats or notional liberals in in tech. I do think some of the personality types and beliefs we're talking about are more concentrated in what some people call little tech, but just like VCs and startups, there's a lot of it. And it's some really powerful people. Like I think a revealing example is someone I talk about, uh, Amjan Masad, who's he's the CEO of Replit.

20:53 They had a strange problem recently where their AI deleted someone's app. But basically it's an AI coding app that mostly has had very good press. They popularized the phrase vibe coding, where you you input a lot of instructions and it creates an app for you, and it's really buggy, but you keep giving it more instructions, and eventually, hopefully, you get you know the weather app that you always wanted or something.

21:14 Just saying I hate that phrase so much.

21:17 Vibe coding. It's annoying. And like the other day, Travis Kalinick was talking about vibe physics, and I was like, you don't know what you're talking about.

21:23 Yeah.

21:23 But it's just a synonym for I don't know something. But the company is well respected, a unicorn startup. He seems to be well respected. He's of Palestinian-Algerian descent, grew up in Jordan, you know, his father's Palestinian, billion-dollar startup, you know, riding the AI wave, got everything going for him, but he is a Muslim part Palestinian founder.

21:45 And he even like is sort of like an anti woke guy. Like he is not some like lefty, but he gets an incredible amount of grief, I would say, on social media. And recently he went on Joe Rogan and he talked a bit about. Gaza and his concern for Palestinians. And some people I talked to, especially Muslim people in tech, this was important to them.

22:07 Say what you will about Joe Rogan. A lot of people watch this. Their bosses all watch this. It was a big deal for like a respected startup CEO to go on Joe Rogan and talk about Gaza. The reaction from people was like Sean Maguire said that he was lying, that Massad was lying on air. Maguire seemed to post some a crop screenshot that was misleading.

22:27 He got into this whole argument with Massad. And then what I found rather amazing was Keith Raboy, who kind of a hateful guy, but Keith Raboy is before compared Massad to a Nazi. Raboy used to work at Founders Fund, close Peter Teal associate. Now he's a partner at Coastla Ventures, the V Nod CoSla, supposedly Democrat, but you know, these guys are all authoritarians.

22:51 Anyway, he's a partner at Coastal Ventures, called uh Massad a Nazi after this most recent kind of dust up over Joe Rogan. He kept calling him a Hamas supporter, Hamas sympathizer. The amazing thing to me is Kostla Ventures is an investor in Masad's company in Replit. Now, Keith Raboy didn't make the investment, some other partner did.

23:14 But like his fortune is tied to it and everything. And it's like very few other industries work like that. I mean, of course, there's harassment or abuse in all kinds of industries, or like, you know, a lot of industries where certain uh traditional ideas of discrimination maybe are put by the wayside, like certainly in Hollywood in some ways.

23:28 But and this is sort of a lesser thing that I heard some people talk about, but I didn't really get to talk about as much in the article. Is like, is there actual discrimination happening here? Like, are VCs in some ways discriminating against potential companies they might invest in or people they work with because they're Muslim or pro-Palestinian or whatever else?

23:44 I mean, a lot of people are worried about getting fired for posting even on LinkedIn about Palestine. There are stories that I haven't confirmed yet of people getting fired for that reason. But like, this is a situation where you could be a CEO of a billion-dollar startup that everyone wants to be a part of, and someone who works for your investor can call you a Nazi and a terrorist online and like nothing happens.

24:06 And that's the other part, I think, of what you were sort of asking about is like not only does this seem to be good for so far for McGuire, but nothing really is happening untoward except some criticism and some maybe bad press that he likes to kind of leverage into you know memes and stuff. No one at Sequoia has really said anything, it seems, at least publicly.

24:28 They've made these comments before about being studiously apolitical, and he does, you know, as people told me, he does produce good returns for them. I don't think he's essential for the Elon relationship. Like, as someone said to me, like, anyone could be the money guy at Sequoia for Elon. Like, Elon just has to just say, like, can I have some money for my next thing?

24:48 And Sequoia will say, Oh, sure, like we want to be part of it. You know, it's probably nice that there's this sort of sycophantic right-winger who shares a lot of must beliefs, but uh it could be any number of people. Anyway, but uh so they don't need to keep him around for that, I think. But you know, frankly, there may be people there who agree with him.

25:06 Like you said, he represents this growing consensus on the tech right, and there's nothing forcing them to do something. There's no policy. So far, there doesn't seem to be anything illegal, and the press isn't really bad enough, and their investors won't want to pull their money because they get great returns.

25:23 Yeah, like it feels like it's not very difficult to be the Musk guy, right? Uh giving Musk money. It's a pretty easy position to hold, I think. Oh, Elon Musk wants money, we give him money.

25:33 Yeah, you just gotta pick up the phone whenever he calls and say, yes, sir, oh, we got a great thing going here. Like, and also your Diablo playing is wonderful.

25:41 Yeah, yeah. You're a real programmer, sir. Uh, we we respect it.

25:45 Yeah. I mean, I think that that says something very sad about where like VC stands now. I do think it is kind of a fact about who is ascendant and like and what people can do and get away with in this kind of world.

25:57 Before we pivot our conversation, I I just wanted to double down on that point that you were making, right? Because I feel like there was a moment in the tech industry where there was a lot of talk about diversity and being open to different types of people and trying to have more people of color and stuff represented at tech companies, right?

26:15 You know, this very different kind of orientation. And now, you know, we're in this moment where certainly we hear a lot publicly about, you know, the problems that anti-Semitism can pose and the rising anti-Semitism in society and how this is a problem. But then you also have these very powerful people, as you're saying, who openly make very racist and Islamophobic remarks, you know, very frequently.

26:40 You can see quite clearly that there seems to be an institutional view within a lot of these tech companies that Israel's genocide is okay, but saying that Palestinians shouldn't be subject to a genocide is something that is kind of like not acceptable in in many cases, or could threaten your job or your position or something.

27:01 It just seems really wild that this is the place where so much of the tech industry finds itself in this moment.

27:08 Yeah, um, Ozzie Osman, who's the CEO of Monarch Money, it's a financial planning app, and he said some things publicly complaining about McGuire's behavior and kind of this double standard. And then he he sent me a message, and I quote from him in the article, he called it very asymmetric. Just like this conflict is pretty asymmetric, frankly, Israel versus the Palestinians.

27:29 In Silicon Valley, you have very war-mongering right-wing VCs saying sometimes plainly offensive stuff about broad populations, including people who work for them, versus, you know, people who are afraid or receiving blowback for making basic expressions of solidarity or support for Palestinian rights or just wanting the war to end.

27:50 One example that was pointing to uh point out to me was the CEO of HIMS, which is, you know, they make pills for uh hair loss and stuff and kind of repackage stuff and friendly ads and nice packaging and kind of their health brand that has done pretty well. The CEO made a public statement to the effect of that he would be willing to hire protesters from Columbia and elsewhere who have been blacklisted, especially after all these CEOs across various industries have said we'll never hire people and tried to dox all sorts of people and stuff.

28:22 It didn't strike me as a very extreme level of support or commitment. I actually it seemed pretty open-minded. And he had an extreme backlash from within the industry. People were trying to short the stock. I mean, I'm sure that happens anyway, but it did not go over well. And I I think he's still CEO of the company and everything.

28:42 But and that's someone who runs a successful company. So that was pointed out to me a lot. And this idea that founders or people of a certain rank and status are really the only ones equipped right now to kind of survive that blowback. And and that's yeah, that's the asymmetric part of this. And that that's what's really unfortunate is how captured it is by an institutional far-right narrative.

29:04 It seems like a real issue, right? And something that we don't talk about nearly enough. Now, I I wanted to pivot because, you know, it feels like to me when we talk about this story about Sean McGuire, it is kind of like a microcosm of this broader change or this greater openness to expressing these extreme right-wing politics and kind of the hold that they have in Silicon Valley.

29:25 I was wondering how you see how pervasive that has become and how it has formed this, I guess, relationship with the Trump administration in terms of trying to express this politics, but also kind of move forward this way of seeing not just the tech industry, but I guess the United States as a whole.

29:43 Well, uh, you know, I think despite Elon Musk falling out with Trump, the tech mag alliance is still in pretty good shape. Even Musk hasn't hasn't really been punished by Trump yet, and he could be still at some point. Or, you know, there are things that Trump could do. He's made threats to take away contracts and stuff like that.

30:00 I think Musk is still like licking his wounds and perhaps surveying how many problems he has in his business empire.

30:06 Yeah, I think Trump said the other day that he wasn't going to be cutting off the subsidies as he uh initially kind of threatened he might do.

30:12 And I wouldn't be surprised if, you know, he sort of dangles that as a possibility repeatedly when he wants something from Musk or wants to kind of bring him to heel again. The two sides, I think they don't always share the same interests or like even sort of like pop cultural interests, but they share a lot of the same resentments, like and cultural resentments.

30:29 And that's something I've written about, and I write about my forthcoming book, which is like anti-wokeness, transphobia, contempt for Democrats, and small L liberalism and democratic governance. You know, they they're not maybe interested in guns or country music or something like that. Heartland MAGA fans might be, but they're angry about a lot of the same things.

30:50 And I think that is still a binding agent, I think, because Trump will also be doing some taking away healthcare from people or other things like that. And the tech people just sort of nod their heads and think, okay, privatization opportunities. Or it'll be something more culturally or kind of socially motivated, like some anti-trans executive order or legislation.

31:11 And and again, I think like that's not going to alienate the tech guys, if anything. Some of them are gonna be all for it, unfortunately. So on that level, I think it's working. I uh working in scare quotes, of course. I think Doge is still kind of doing what it wants to do, but I think more than kind of cutting a lot of money out of the budget, it it's still making inroads for privatization and kind of the shoehorning of AI into everything.

31:35 That of course, there's a lot that they're doing that we probably don't know about. It's still kind of unclear about, you know, is there just a fire hose of data from federal agencies going to XAI? There very well could be. There's certainly, we know there's a lot of bad stuff, illegal and anti-democratic, purely by bypassing the civil service and and oversight mechanisms.

31:54 You know, Trump fired all 18 inspectors general on like day one. So they have been complicit and participating in this total dismantlement of the rule of law, of checks and balances, of regulatory oversight. And a lot of them, of course, are very invested in crypto and have been happy also to see the crypto industry get everything it wants, culminating in the bills passed last week, the Genius Act, which is the stablecoin bill, has been passed by both houses, the Clarity Act, which basically I joked on Twit on X somewhere, Sam Bankman-Fried is crying in a federal prison cell because this is exactly what he wanted, which is the Clarity Act basically gives most authority over crypto to the CFTC,

32:37 which is a much smaller agency, much easier to deal with. It's already cutting jobs at the same time. And the SEC kind of gets kneecapped a little bit, and then they get to start doing like trading these perpetual futures products, which was the bread and butter of FTX overseas a number of years ago.

32:53 They get to do kind of everything they want now.

32:55 Is there any like hope or signal of San Bank Maffrey getting out early, or is he just kind of like forgotten to rot at this point?

33:02 It's one of those things that I would I would not discount because there's so many people who got pardoned at the beginning, the first six months, I mean, up to this date. People who admitted to serious crimes, to fraud, to stealing from vulnerable people at times, you know, who made plea deals to not end up like Bankman Freed.

33:21 Of course, he was seen as a liberal. That is not a fully accurate view. I mean, and he donated a lot of money under the table to Republicans and had relationships with them. I think if it comes, it might somehow come through Peter Thiel, who um supposedly, according to ProPublica and other reporting, I believe, gave basically there's sort of this line about how Epstein gave great tax advice, and that's why people paid him hundreds of millions of dollars.

33:47 But supposedly, Sam McMahon Fried's father, Joseph Bankman, basically pointed Peter Thiel towards this method of putting your stock in an IRA and allowing it to appreciate there and avoiding potentially billions of dollars worth of capital gains taxes. And that's what he's done. ProPublica has this article, has report on it.

34:05 The whistleblower on that, of course, went to prison. He put his a lot of his Facebook stock in this IRA and other stock, I think. And there you go. He won't pay billions of dollars worth of taxes. So that's a that's a huge favor. And Joseph Bankman, despite being seen as a liberal, like he's a scholar of tax shelters and tax evasion.

34:24 Like, yeah, he's wrote written about here's how we should simplify the tax code and make it easier for regular people, but his son did an incredible act of financial thievery, seemingly with his father attending most of the key meetings. So, you know, I think the narrative that this was all just like liberals doing bad is wrong or not quite accurate.

34:44 So, and the other side of it is that Trump has become incredibly transactional, of course, and anything can kind of happen. So, yeah, I didn't think it last year, but now I think it's possible. I don't think most of the crypto industry wants that. I do think a lot of them personally hate him, just like don't like him as a person.

34:59 They've gotten along fine without him. I don't know how many allies he has left, but not the majority, not like someone like Brian Armstrong and Coinbase, I think, who has taken the leadership mantle, at least in the US. So, you know, I think they would probably lobby against it. But yeah, it could I think it could really happen.

35:15 Yeah, it probably helps for them to say, look, uh, you know, the the scammer, the the real bad guy is behind bars, and now we're like the legitimate industry that is that is still left here, right?

35:24 They certainly were saying that a few years ago. Like, thank God we got rid of that guy. None of us liked him. All of us did business with him and like appeared everywhere with him, but none of us liked him, and he was the one scammer, so thank God we can move on.

35:36 How convenient. But you mentioned the the Genius Act and the Clarity Act there. I w can you go into what these actually are a little bit more and what they mean for you know the way that the US is going to approach crypto regulation now and you know the potential threats that it really sets up now that this industry is going to be unleashed in a in a much greater way to make these products available, to promote them to people, to try to get people to buy into what we know are very risky assets.

36:07 You know that this is a crypto-friendly bill, just by the name alone the Clarity Act, because the crypto industry for years under Biden was asking for, quote, regulatory clarity. That was their favorite phrase. And the Biden administration said, you have regulatory clarity. I mean, not always in the strongest of language, but they would say, you have regulatory clarity.

36:24 You just aren't abiding by existing securities laws. And you know, there would be these instances where crypto exchanges would come in and they would say like to the SEC and have meetings with people there under Gary Gensler, their arch enemy, and the crypto industry would say, This is how our business works.

36:40 And the SEC would say, well, that's not really legal under current market structures. Um, first of all, you can't combine all these different functions under one roof. You know, you're based overseas, your KYC AML, which is no, your customer anti-money laundering doesn't seem up to snuff, like various things that they just seem to could not satisfy existing securities regulations.

37:00 And the crypto companies would leave saying, like, that's outrageous, like you're just not embracing innovation, you're you know holding back the crypto companies, you want us to fail. That was the impasse, basically. And we can get into why that was disastrous politically or something like that, but that that was the disagreement.

37:15 And so uh under Trump, through executive orders, through changes in personnel and policy, because you know the the new heads of these agencies can do a lot to dictate policy, they've basically given the industry everything they that they've wanted. So they they started out by pardoning a lot of people, by dismantling units at the DOJ and SEC focused on crypto crime, ended a bunch of lawsuits and prosecutions, including against you know notable people like Justin Sun that were probably slam dunks under a competent administration.

37:45 And then you get the legislation, which is finally passing. So you had the the Genius Act is passed in both houses. It's just, I think it's just got to be signed by Trump, or maybe he already signed it this week. I think that was the one he had Paolo Adorno from Tether in his office, which is another one of those, oh my God, I can't believe it moments.

38:03 You know, this is someone who could not travel to the U.S. under the Biden administration, only started coming to America this year. You know, his product is like the token used for global money laundering besides Bitcoin. It's a key link in that in that network, that chain, whether he's aware of it or not.

38:21 And here he is. It was incredible. But Justin Sun's another person like that. Now his company just went public on Nasdaq this week. He was wearing a tuxedo and ringing the bells. And now they're like, wow, the the criminals are in charge.

38:34 Is he still the uh ambassador for Granada or whatever?

38:38 He was so Justin Sun is famous for jurisdiction hopping. He was in San Francisco for a little while, like six years ago or more, and then he left and has been in Asia, in Hong Kong. He's a Chinese national, though his citizen may citizenship seems to be St. Kitts and Nevis. He has spent a lot of time in Hong Kong recently and talks very highly of the Chinese government.

38:58 I mean, he's the kind of guy who always seems to be looking for protection. So a couple years ago, he went to Granada, seemed to pay for citizenship, and became their ambassador to the World Trade Organization. And so he had appended his excellence, I believe it was, or HE, to his name and his social media handles, and it was occasionally going to Switzerland to take pictures.

39:20 Then a couple years later, the government, thankfully democratically, turned over in Granada, and the new administration was just like, no, thank you. You can retire your hat and your H E.

39:31 Yeah, what is going on here?

39:33 Yeah, and then he left. And I think he's been mostly in Hong Kong since. But he now travels much more freely than he did under the Biden administration. He's another guy who was not coming to the U.S. under the Biden administration. He also famously bought a space flight on a Jeff Bezos rocket in 2021 for 28 million.

39:52 He might have bought two seats, but he paid a lot of money. And since then he's been saying, Oh, I'm too busy. But now in Vegas at the big crypto conference a couple months ago, he was there. He had women dressed up in space suits doing this whole sort of like stunt on his behalf. And he's recently did some articles talking about how and some interviews, how he's talking about, I'm finally going to space.

40:14 Everything has kind of come full circle culturally, but especially legally and enforcement-wise. There's like no mechanism, like, and the DOJ can also like set priorities. So the government has basically said, don't enforce a lot of this financial crime. We don't care about this. I mean, another executive order was to not enforce the FCPA, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which is something that actually they should have prosecuted Sam Bakeman-Fried under because he allegedly bribed Chinese officials more than $150 million worth of crypto.

40:45 Carolyn Ellison testified to this in court. But now that kind of thing is actually legal because the Trump administration said we're not going to enforce that. And this was an important law that actually restrained a lot of bad behavior by both American companies and foreign companies who didn't want to really be caught in the net of like, you know, bribing the government of Guinea for a mining concession and then being caught and getting screwed over by American authorities, which did happen sometimes and was like a obviously a tool of soft power, but sometimes a good thing for kind of global rule of law and governance.

41:16 So everywhere you turn, this is all gone. And then it's been codified now in this legislation. The Clarity Act really makes it so that a lot of these tokens probably don't have to be registered as securities, which is what the SEC wanted before for them to be registered as securities, is all pretty much going to go under the CFTC, which previously ruled that Bitcoin and Ethereum are commodities, just like corn or oil.

41:39 Why not? And the main picture here is that like a lot of things that they've been doing or want to do are going to be legal. They're going to have better access to US banking and finance, which is what they've wanted all along too. And they won't be breaking the law just by issuing tokens and trading them on their own exchanges.

41:58 On, you know, the New York Stock Exchange or NASDAQ or a lot of foreign stock exchanges, you have these different roles that are divided. Like you would never have a trading firm owned by NASDAQ trading on NASDAQ. But that's what FTX and Binance did do or do, and what a lot of US-based exchanges probably do.

42:19 You have all these kinds of uh roles vertically integrated. And this was what the SEC was saying. No, you can't do that because you can manipulate markets, trade against your customers, there's all kinds of room for corruption. You can allow people to front run if they pay you extra, you know, all sorts of things that happen in mainstream finance, but there are mechanisms to guard against them.

42:39 And now we're just not going to really have that. You'll have kind of a fig leaf regulatory structure that has a few protections. But, you know, I recently talked to a congressman yesterday, Sean Caston from Illinois, who talks about this stuff a lot. He thinks that this is still gonna be a huge vector for money laundering, whether you're the president or whether you're one of these other financial criminals.

43:02 Because if you're in the no, you'll still be able to do it via stable coins and offshore exchanges.

43:08 I'll come back to what you said there about the president in just a second, but I have like a grab bag of smaller questions based on what you were saying there. Feel free to address what you want to address, but does this set up greater risks for average people now because this is going to be more integrated into the financial system?

43:27 Does it set up like structural concerns for the financial system, like possibility of economic collapse, recession? And I guess the final question that I have around those is I've seen some people writing about how kind of legitimizing stable coins becomes actually a threat to like the dominance of the US dollar and the position of the US dollar in the global system.

43:50 So I wonder on you know what your thoughts are on those different pieces of this.

43:54 There wasn't contagion related to the mainstream financial system. Now, a lot of everyday people unfortunately did lose their money. Money because this was the the boom for everyday retail traders and speculators, like people like you and me, and your taxi driver, people you meet in restaurants, or like or your cousin, it was like, yeah, I saw the Tom Brady commercial, I'm going to go buy a bunch of meme coins.

44:14 And then unfortunately, they lost their shirts. But there wasn't a lot of fallout in mainstream finance or kind of the legitimate economy. There were some crypto-related banks in the last couple of years that failed. But beyond that, there wasn't contagion, as they say. Now, to I think society's benefit, a lot of the everyday retail traders are gone.

44:33 Like those everyday people are they bought the pitch before, but no longer, or they don't have money to gamble, they're not stuck at home during COVID with a relief check that they might want to gamble on some Bitcoin. The trading volume from regular people isn't there. But what that means is that the industry needs money from government and from corporate sources.

44:52 So there's been a real movement to get union money, both private and public sector unions, into crypto, whether it's on their balance sheets or putting retirement funds into crypto or crypto-related ETFs, or companies like MicroStrategy, which are are now considered kind of a proxy for owning Bitcoin.

45:11 Well, putting retirement savings into crypto is okay because Kara Swisher told me in that ad that time.

45:17 I know, it's incredible. And so did Kirsten Gillibrand, who's supposed to be, you know, the Democratic Center from New York, the World Capital Finance has been, I mean, this is something that deserves emphasis every so often. She's been leading all of this, especially the genius bill. She's very proud of it.

45:32 And maybe she gets uh some nice donations from the industry, but it's just incredible that at this late date there are Democrats who don't understand or are unwilling to acknowledge that this industry is not just like is their political enemy and is contrary to their constituents' interests. I mean, I've talked to people like that rep I mentioned earlier, Sean Caston, who says, you know, he begs some of his colleagues to vote against things and they're just like, look, I know it's bad, it hurts my soul, but they're gonna spend so much money against me in the next round, the next uh election cycle.

46:01 And that's kind of as far as some of these people go. But anyway, the the concern is that now that this is really moving into kind of load-bearing parts of the economy, it could be really bad next time. And it will be because this happens every few years with crypto. Uh, and because there's a lot of fraud in the system, there's a lack of fundamental value.

46:19 So even just recently, Trump issued an executive order kind of making it easier for 401ks to invest in crypto. And what I tell people also is that like you may not be interested in crypto, but it's like the line about politics. Crypto is sort of interested in you. Or at least we're gonna have to play by the crypto industry's rules of deregulation, high risk, high leverage, betting on extremely risky speculative products that have no fundamental value, that are even derivatives of products with no value.

46:46 And that spreads risk throughout the system. And it also means that like you may have exposure to crypto, whether you like it or not. Like your retirement account, which is managed by some fund manager, may have Coinbase in it because Coinbase, I think, is now part of the SP 500, or it may have micro strategy in it for similar reasons.

47:05 Like these um crypto-related companies are entering into index funds or or the indexes that become part of index funds. So like you might be a few degrees removed from like the price of Bitcoin going up and down. But in some ways, that makes it even worse because then there's leverage that that's in the system and sort of a cascade effect that can happen when like Bitcoin goes down.

47:25 It's not just the people holding Bitcoin, it's all this stuff that's connected to it. You know, I think that's kind of a uh guarantee at this point. I don't know when, but we're really dismantling all the mechanisms to prevent that from happening. And some of them I think also to ameliorate it or deal with it once it happens.

47:42 One danger is that the losses will be socialized and that the crypto industry, who are some of the worst political actors we have, are gonna be bailed out.

47:49 Yeah, it it seems like a huge risk, right? The more and more that this works its way into the system. It it just feels like obviously it's not the same as what happened in in 2008 in the lead up to that, but like the more you see this financial deregulation, the more you're kind of set up for a time when sure things can boom in the short term, but then things are gonna come crashing down and we're all gonna have to feel the effects of that, right?

48:12 Yeah, and and there are some definite similarities. I mean, there's a reason why people are posting big short gifts all the time. Like there's a huge bubble. And also like during the housing crisis, like, yeah, at least people had houses, but one of the problems was there are all these like complex financial instruments or these synthetic derivatives that again were a few degrees removed from any tangible asset or debt or mortgage itself, created all this risky, highly leveraged economic activity that was fundamentally not productive, except for some Wall Street high-rollers who were taking huge risks on this stuff.

48:42 And so, like, once again, we're having this like financializing of what in this case is actually a worthless underlying asset, uh, not you know, houses and mortgages have some value. But again, a similar kind of process and financial engineering is taking place. And I think if it's not the cause of the next recession, it's gonna be like one of the explosive catalysts, you know.

49:06 You know, maybe there'll be a war or an or an asset collapse in some other sector or something like that, or the AI bubble will burst because open AI and others can't pay their bills anymore. But you know, this will be a huge component of it that will affect a lot of people, unfortunately.

49:22 Definitely. And, you know, you mentioned the president there. As we as we start to wrap up, you know, we're talking about cryptocurrency. Donald Trump is obviously passing these bills that are going to make it easier for these companies to get everywhere throughout the American financial system. But he has been very much involved in cryptocurrency himself and in particular trying to make a lot of money off of it.

49:41 And it also seems, you know, based on some of your reporting and some other things that I've read, that these crypto folks are also trying to buy influence with them through buying these crypto tokens and things like that. So what do we see in that aspect of it with the, I guess like corruption, but but also like just the way that he is enriching himself by using these crypto tokens?

50:00 Trump is making hundreds of millions of dollars, if not billions of dollars already, through a number of crypto ventures. You know, we don't have to get into all the details, but there's the meme coins. World Liberty Financial is the most important one, and there's the World Liberty Financial token, there's the stable coin that they're issuing.

50:15 I mean, which just as a quick aside, how could any Democrats vote for a stable coin bill while the president is about to issue his own stable coins? Like it's just absurd. But, you know, the main point is he he's just kind of able to issue either himself or through his proxies kind of tokens on demand, and anyone can buy in and put money in his pocket, whether he makes the deal or they want to or not.

50:39 Like with crypto, anyone can send him money. I've said this in a couple interviews, but like if you're a foreign head of state, it's in your direct financial interest to buy either the Trump meme coin or World of Liberty financial tokens and to make sure Trump knows it. And you don't have to call him up and ask permission.

50:54 You can just go online and tell your finance minister if you're the dictator of some country or you're Victor Orban or whoever, you know, buy these tokens before Trump comes for his state visit. And then we're gonna ask him, you know, to build a radar station here or, you know, give us a billion dollars or something.

51:10 That's just a new facet of statecraft right now, I think. I mean, there are other ways in the past to bribe officials. We've of course seen Trump get the $400 million jet from Qatar, which is a huge problem from just a bribery and security perspective. But this is an ongoing thing with kind of no limit, potentially.

51:30 There's more than $150 billion worth of tether in circulation, and this is like a pseudo-legal token, but not really. What's the stop there being $100 billion worth of USD-1, the Trump stable coin, in circulation in a year or two? It could happen if, you know, they just want to, or if the bad people who are already putting money into his companies continue to do that.

51:52 So, you know, we have the example of Justin Sun, who now I think it's about 200 million across various investments and token purchases. He had his SEC case dropped against him, a multi-billion dollar fraud suit. He's clearly feels free to travel into the U.S. now. He went to Mar-a-Lago, to this gala there, the meme coin gala.

52:10 He's doing big things. He's promised to support Trump's stablecoin. There's deals, it seems, or involving Binance, the shadiest crypto exchange in the world, has a very long rap sheet, but its CEO is now seeking a pardon. And then, as I've been trying to report on more, they're like all these people that we don't really know about or are a little murkier in their dealings with Trump and his crypto empire, which includes, you know, Trump's sons and includes Steve Whitkop, Trump's most important diplomat, Steve Whitkop's sons.

52:39 Like this is very much a fusion of the political office, Trump's friends and family and business interests. So one of the ones I report about recently is last month, there was something called the Aqua One Foundation published a press release saying, we bought $100 million worth of World Liberty Financial token.

52:57 We're proud to be in business with them. We're going to support the stablecoin and future projects. And there was only one person named in connection with that company, someone named Dave Lee. And he had an X account, but it was very thin and it was hard to tell who he was or what this company was. And I published a piece in The Nation basically saying, like, it doesn't seem like this company exists.

53:18 I can't find anything saying that Aqua One Foundation is a real thing. You go and look on the blockchain, and you can actually see where they sent at least $80 million worth of stable coins to World Liberty Financial. Like a deal happened, but I couldn't find anything, and no one would tell me anything.

53:33 I contacted World Liberty Financial's PR. They said, we'll get back to you. They never got back to me. And then I published that first piece of the nation. Basically, you know, here's the good faith effort I made to find something here. I contact all these people. There's nothing here except for money being sent.

53:49 So I got a good tip and I basically did some research and investigating online and was able to find with a pretty good degree of certainty who this Dave Lee behind the company was, the guy with the X account. Their server was hosting a website of what turned out to be a related company and also some stuff he had tweeted about.

54:08 Under his other company, he's appeared at public events, which there are videos of those events. Like it was kind of piecing together this trail. And, you know, I was almost positive that I had the right guy. And then things that have happened since, I am positive. But it appears he grew up in Brazil.

54:24 He's of Chinese parentage. There was a Chinese publication that did a small bit of reporting about him that said he supposedly comes from a wealthy business family that moved to Brazil. Doesn't really say much more than that. He went to NYU and went to business school there. I have a picture of him in a club in New York.

54:43 Seems to come from some means. And then he went to China and mostly Hong Kong and got involved with a company. And this was the link, really, called Web3Port. Web3Port is known as a market maker behind all these crypto projects, but they have been accused of basically manipulating markets or scamming or running off with the money a few times now.

55:04 And my theory is that Web3Port was trying to rebrand under Aqua One without really telling anyone. They didn't do a very good job of it. And the last bit of it is this guy seems to have a day job in finance. He works for the biggest Chinese state energy company in their finance department, I believe, as a manager of some type.

55:23 You know, they probably employ hundreds or thousands of people who do this kind of stuff. But, you know, I'm not a big hawk, a China hawk or anything, but it is strange. And we're talking about foreign influence and like, where did someone like this get $100 million? They've seemingly done big crypto deals before under the other name, the Web3 port.

55:39 They've invested in other companies, but still, not every kind of crypto hustler in Southeast Asia or East Asia has $100 million to send to the president of the United States. And somehow this guy does. And since then he's done some things like he kind of acknowledged controlling both websites. He never actually denied that he's this guy.

55:58 He just sort of gave me the worst PR speak emails of saying, like, we're glad to answer any questions, but he still never answered any questions. But again, he's acknowledged controlling the websites and done a couple other things that I'm pretty much 100% sure it's him. He also sent me some dick picks afterwards through a couple of like throwaway signal accounts, which I'm it's gotta be him.

56:18 I mean, the first one said, Hey, I have something about your uh Aqua One Foundation article. Cue the pick. It's a weird thing because this guy is like, this is a big deal. You know, this is someone who's representing mysterious interests, is sending the president, uh, I mean, the president gets like 75% of all token sales from this company, sending the president like $75 million, basically.

56:39 And yet he has kind of has bad opse and responds with like juvenile behavior. He also shut down one of his accounts that helped me link the two of them, and then he reopened it. So, like, you know, I'm sure this is the guy. He hasn't named a single fact I got wrong. But at the same time, like, nothing has happened.

56:56 It hasn't even been picked up by mainstream media, I think. Some crypto media reported about it. But like, and this is gonna keep happening, is kind of the point, too. Like, I'm glad I identified this one guy. Frankly, it was pretty satisfying, but like there's a lot more of this out there. And some of these will be announced and the and the people will be tracked down, like I did.

57:13 And some of these are never gonna be announced or never gonna pass through the blockchain. They'll be done over the OTC at you know, at a meeting between Don Jr. and some UAE prince in Dubai. And no one will ever know. So that's why like we're really talking about the biggest financial scandal in or corruption case in US presidential history.

57:34 Like, this is like I hate to be condescending by saying this is banana republic stuff or something, but this is like, you know, authoritarian president steals everything and then flees to Riyadh or Moscow. It's like that kind of thing. And uh and that's why I'm constantly banging the drum about this, and like that I think it's really important.

57:50 Absolutely. You know, I remember during the first Trump administration where we'd occasionally be talking about, you know, the foreign government spending money at his hotel in DC and then telling him about how nice it was there, you know, to like get that degree of influence. But this is just on a whole nother level.

58:07 The amount of money, the way it's being done, the way it's like not even really being, you know, as you're saying, like a lot of this mainstream media, there's so much going on that they're not even really picking up on this thread of the story, even though it's going to be so consequential, right?

58:23 And I've written about some of this stuff for mainstream publications. I mean, when I unmasked that guy, the f which was a follow-up to a nation article, I published on my own website, knowing that it might not be seen as much. But, you know, I did hear from someone at the intercept, for example, who's like, oh, we would have liked that.

58:37 And I'm like, so you know, there are people who are interested, but it's combined with this tremendous sort of apathy and indifference by a lot of people. Of course, the crypto aspect makes it harder for some folks to understand or they just want to ignore it. But, you know, I think the the sort of quick way to kind of reach normies is to say, like, you don't need to pay too much attention to the crypto or the technology.

58:56 Just at bottom, this is a way of for Trump to line his pockets with potentially unlimited money. And people are already doing it, already getting favors from it, and all the enforcement mechanisms have been disabled so that he can keep doing it. And, you know, there's nothing to stop one of these authoritarian powers or supposed US allies from from giving Trump billions of dollars in a single transaction.

59:19 Yeah, it's absolutely wild to even think about, right? That it's possible that it's happening, and what can come out of it. Jacob, it's always great to have you on the show to get your insights about all these things. Obviously, you'll be back on the show soon because you have a book coming out, and I can't wait to talk to you about it.

59:34 But thanks so much for taking the time. Always appreciate the conversations.

59:37 Oh, it's always fun. Thanks, Paris.

59:41 Jacob Silverman is a journalist and author of the forthcoming book Gilded Rage, which you can pre-order now. Tech Won't Save Us is made in partnership with the Nation magazine and is hosted by me, Paris Marks. Production is by Kylie Hewson. Tech Won's Save Us relies on the support of listeners like you to keep providing critical perspectives on the tech industry.

59:58 You can join hundreds of other supporters by going to patreon.com slash tech won't save us and making a pledge of your own. Thanks for listening and make sure to come back next week.